Free City of the Lost by Will Adams

Homer praises the Phoenicians in the
Iliad
, for example, but then derides them in the
Odyssey
. And the
Odyssey
also pokes fun at the
Iliad
, which is odd if he wrote them both.’
    ‘Maybe he didn’t take himself too seriously,’ said Iain.
    ‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘There are all kinds of explanations. That’s why people like me argue about it. But there are other questions too. More to do with the general history of the era. The ones I studied for my thesis, and which Nathan was particularly interested in.’
    ‘And what are those?’
    ‘How his books were even possible. You see, the Trojan War, if it really happened, which is a big debate all in itself, took place towards the end of the Late Bronze Age. Somewhere around 1200 BC , give or take. Yet the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
weren’t composed until the Early Iron Age: 800 BC at the earliest, more likely nearer to 700 BC or even later.’ It wasn’t merely enthusiasm either; it was command, authority. Iain had always had a weakness for smart women confident in their expertise. Watching Karin now, he had a sudden, vivid flashback, waking up weak and dazed to find a tall woman of angular beauty standing beside his bed in a loose white medic’s coat, frowning down at him as she jotted notes upon a clipboard.
    ‘So we’ve got this gap of around four hundred years to explain,’ Karin was saying. ‘And not any old years. There was a terrible dark age between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron. Do you know about this?’
    He’d collapsed, apparently. On a flight back from Pakistan. And, because he’d been delirious with some strange fever, and thus liable to say something indiscreet about his mission, they’d summoned a specialist in exotic diseases with an appropriate level of clearance. ‘Assume I know nothing,’ he told Karin. ‘You can’t go far wrong that way.’
    ‘Okay. Then this is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC , the eastern Mediterranean was reasonably stable. Roughly speaking, Greece and the Aegean were ruled by a loose confederation of Mycenaean kings; the Hittites ran Turkey; the New Kingdom Pharaohs had Egypt and Israel; and the Assyrians ran Syria, Iraq and Iran. Then something terrible happened. The trouble is, we don’t know what. Archaeologists call it the Catastrophe, but mainly that’s because it sounds cool and what else can you call it? But, whatever it was, it scared the shit out of people.’
    Her name had been Tisha Morgan. A professor of microbiology brought in from her London research institute to diagnose his condition, then cure him of it. Scrawny, Mustafa had called her. And maybe so. But what Iain had mostly noticed about her at the time was how fully she’d committed herself to his cause. It was why she’d gone into research, she’d later confided to him; because she’d been prone to get too attached to her wards, and therefore took it too hard when she lost them. ‘How can you tell?’
    ‘By excavating old cities like Tiryns and Mycenae,’ explained Karin. ‘They
massively
strengthened their fortifications. They built huge storerooms and dug deep wells or secret underground passages to nearby springs. All classic signs that they feared something bad. But it did them no good. They pretty much all got sacked and burned. And this wasn’t only in Greece. Same thing across the whole eastern Med, from the Hittites here in Turkey all the way down to Egypt. And no one knows what or who or why.’
    With Tisha’s help, he’d soon overcome his fever. Getting over her, however, had proved somewhat harder. After his discharge from hospital, he’d fought the urge to go see her, telling himself he was being stupid, that there was no way they could fit into each other’s lives, that there were plenty of other women out there. But he couldn’t shake the feeling and finally he’d succumbed. He’d visited her at her institute. They’d taken coffee together